[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#580309: Bug#580309: network-manager: Should not depend on ifupdown

[Josh Triplett]

On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 07:15:35PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> On 03.08.2010 19:06, Josh Triplett wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 02:18:37AM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> >> On 05.05.2010 08:09, Josh Triplett wrote:
> >>> Package: network-manager
> >>> Version: 0.8-1
> >>> Severity: wishlist
> >>>
> >>> NetworkManager has support for integrating with ifupdown to cooperate
> >>> with the system-wide configuration the user already has.  However, it
> >>> seems like NetworkManager should work fine with ifupdown not installed
> >>> at all, since it then has no configuration to cooperate with.  If the
> >>> sysadmin wants ifupdown and its configuration, they'll already have it
> >>> installed; NetworkManager shouldn't need to depend on it.
> >>>
> >>> So, could NetworkManager remove its ifupdown Depends, or change it to an
> >>> Enhances or similar?
> >>
> >> The dependency on ifupdown is correct, as ifup is used to setup the loopback
> >> interface
> >> (see backends/NetworkManagerDebian.c:void nm_system_enable_loopback (void))
> > 
> > Thanks for that information; I didn't know that.
> > 
> > I filed an upstream bug report
> > (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=625427) requesting that this
> > function handle the case where ifup doesn't exist, and Dan Williams
> > fixed it in upstream git.  Now, if ifup doesn't exist, NetworkManager
> > will bring up the loopback interface itself.
> > 
> > Once that change makes its way into the Debian packaged version, would
> > you consider dropping the Depends on ifupdown in favor of a Suggests or
> > Enhances?
> 
> Sure, as soon as there is a safe fallback, demoting to Suggests or dropping the
> ifupdown dependency altogether is fine (I'll probably go for the latter).

Fair enough.  Suggests doesn't really fit, anyway, and Enhances seems
too sparsely supported to bother with, as far as I can tell.

> I just checked the Git repo and the change is simple enough, so I'm going to
> cherry pick this patch for the next upload.

Thanks!  I appreciate that.

On my systems, only network-manager depends on ifupdown, and ifupdown
manages nothing except the loopback interface, so this change will let
me remove ifupdown entirely and let NetworkManager handle everything.

I look forward to exploring what breakage that triggers in other
packages.  :)

> Thanks for forwarding this issue upstream.

No problem.

- Josh Triplett